Cascades LiveView app for QML devs

I'm announcing that the BlackBerry-Py Project (of which I'm one of the founders) has just released an updated version of our famous QML LiveView utility, for the first time supporting Cascades.

Cascades LiveView is a simple developer's tool which lets you select a .qml file (which for now must have a Page as its top-level component) and load it. Much more importantly, it monitors that file and other .qml files in the same folder, watching for changes, and reloads the original file every time there is a change.

This means you can dump some .qml files for a portion of the UI you're working on into shared/misc (via the WiFi or USB Samba share) and load it up on the device to see how it will really work. Sometimes this is less fuss and more effective than using the QML preview feature in Momentics. Any changes you save to the file(s) will be noticed within a second and the main file will be loaded again, instantly showing you the updated page. If there are errors, it will show those instead, until you fix and save and see the corrected page again.

It's not sophisticated in any way yet... I just wrote this in the last few hours. It already works well enough that I used it to quickly turn its own "UI" (which hardly deserves the name) from a single "Load QML" button into this, umm, work of art ;-) , as a form of eating my own dogfood:

Please note, although this app is written in QML/Cascades and Python, it will work perfectly well for those doing QML/Cascades UIs on top of C++ code in the regular way. (And if any of you Haskad.es guys are reading, you're welcome either to use this, or steal the idea and roll your own. Healthy competition! ;-) )

Certainly not as part of this little app. This is just a wee tool for developers to get a productivity boost when creating new QML, mainly intended for custom components although I'm not sure what all the limitations are yet. It might prove beneficial even for entire page layouts.

If you do use this, you'll probably find it helpful to have something like a "property bool DEBUG: true" in the page and use that to enable/disable certain behaviors. I use something like that to have an onCreationCompleted set up model data for testing, and to disable certain things that depend on other stuff outside the page in question. The app can't replace missing logic that the rest of your UI or app code would provide, so you likely wouldn't use this past the point where a particular component or page felt somewhat "mature" or at least stable, and you could stop with the second-by-second tweaking for which some people would just use the Momentics Preview mode.

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